ATI multi chip cards for the military

WE'VE HAD QUITE a few emails about our news where "Dave" said that ATI is already shipping multi chip devices. Here is the original.

You all should look here as this is one famous company that makes simulators for military purposes. Those machines put games like Doom 3 in shame as they have to simulate planes, battles and tanks.

It occurs to me that the military has to have its own 3D programmers for such a project even though many of such projects are done by contractors. Imagine being a major programming DirectX 9 military simulation, I am sure that there are some. Maybe they even read the INQ, you never know.

Some of their machines such as simFUSION use two Radeon 9700/9800 chips on one card. You can see them here.

Another machine is The EXP-500 and you can see its details here.

Meanwhile, the Baumann guy that is at Beyond3d pointed us to two machines - the E&S SimFUSION 6000 and the SGI Onyx Reality 4. Both of them use multiple R300 chips - R350 for RenderBEAST.

Those chips have a tiling mechanism that regionalises the rendering portions to different pipelines. He said that this method is also applies across numerous chips. This is a hardware function, not a driver function.

Our friends at techbit.ca told us that ATI confirmed to them our news about multi chip cards and Patricia Mikula, ATI's PR manager said in a recent meeting that the X800 line of cards could support up to 256 cores operating together with each card capable of addressing 1GB of memory.

When you think about it, you could have 256 X800 Platinum chips clocked at 520MHz with 256GB memory on one huge card. I guess you would get 2000 FPS in Doom 3 with FSAA 16X and Aniso 32 X. The only trouble with this kind of card, apart from the cost, is that we are not sure there are there 256 Platinum chips available.

If you are really well in with ATI you might get a card with two cores to play your Doom 3 at amazing frame rate. Could this be the answer to Nvidia's SLI?

Thanks to all our readers for the info. µ